This is my review of Le Mystere Frontenac (Le Livre de Poche) by Francois Mauriac.

A wealthy bourgeois family with property in "les Landes", region of pines and marshes, the Frontenac s are burdened with the need for conformity and respectability. Widowed early, the pious and neurotic Blanche Frontenac dedicates herself to her five children. Her brother-in-law Xavier, makes a similar commitment: he is miserly with himself, keen that as much wealth as possible should be safeguarded for the children. We see flashes of his softer side as he makes camphor-powered toy boats for them. Yet he is flawed: he cannot resist taking a mistress, the longsuffering Josefa, too socially inferior for him to marry, and goes to excessive lengths to conceal her existence from the family, needless to say all in vain.

The brilliant, academically inclined Jean-Louis accepts his duty to run the family business. The frail and hypersensitive younger brother Yves, who shows early promise as an avant-garde poet is allowed to follow his whims: the close bond between these two is compared to that between Xavier and his deceased brother, who resembled Yves.

Described as one of Mauriac's more positive works (I must admit to preferring the bitter venom of his other novels), you probably need to share his sense of Catholic mysticism to appreciate this fully. Not much happens, the "mystère Frontenac" is so subtle you could miss it, I found it all too mawkish at times, and agree with the reviewer who found it "dated".

Despite this, it is a powerful exercise in nostalgia, evoking a lost way of life on the brink of World War. The magic of childhood with the freedom to play, without adult cares, is captured well. Descriptions of the landscape are very vivid. Dialogues are sharp and realistic, with what may have been a new trend in the 1930s to intercut them with people's private thoughts, often very different from what they say. Some observations on the mindless and futile nature of the modern commercial world of mass production about to destroy the Frontenac way of life, are also prescient – I could have done with more of that angle.

The structure seems quite weak and I would have liked a fuller development of the interplay between the four main characters: Blanche, Xavier, Jean-Louis and Yves. However, it is worth reading as an early modern classic

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Kiffe kiffe demain (Le Livre de Poche) by Faiza Guene.

Kiffe Kiffe Demain (Same Old Tomorrow) is notable for being the work of Faïza Guène, written when still a teenager and making use of her experience as a girl of Algerian origin growing up in Paris.

The short, journal style chapters record the thoughts of Doria, a fifteen-year-old girl living in a grim tower block in a Paris suburb, understandably bitter because her father has returned to Morocco to find a new wife who will hopefully give him a son. Her illiterate mother struggles to make ends meet with a hotel cleaning job, where the racist boss calls all the Arab women "Fatima" and the Chinese workers "Ping Pong". Forced to accept charity from neighbours and buy untrendy clothing at cheap sales, Doria and her mother have to endure visits from a social worker, while the teenager is also required to visit a psychiatrist to improve her withdrawn behaviour, and low school grades.

Doria is far from a tearaway – she frantically cleans the cooker to pass muster when the social worker pays a "spot check" visit, and dresses as her mother wishes. Yet, she is quietly subversive in her private thoughts, and is drawn to unconventional people like the local drug-dealing dropout Hamoudi, who challenges the system, and quotes Rimbaud's poetry at her, encouraging her to better herself.

Doria is inevitably naive in many ways, and her dreams and reactions are generally couched in terms of the cartoons, soaps and American films she has absorbed on the TV. Her language is often crude – a weird mix of Arabic and French "verlan" – leading her to comment on how she has to make an effort to speak correctly to her "shrink" since they are "not really on the same wavelength".

There are some moving moments in the book, as when she takes her mother to see the Eiffel Tower for the first time, although it is only a short ride from home, but they meekly accept that they cannot afford the tickets to climb to the top. On another occasion Doria tells us that her eyes are like her father's so that when she looks in the mirror she sees his nostalgic look – an admission that he has been pulled back to Morocco partly through homesickness. When she can look in the mirror and see only herself, she will be cured.

The book is revealing on the status of women in Arab communities. It is interesting that three of the young women mentioned manage to escape into careers or relationships with men on equal terms – but at the price of losing contact with their roots, at least for a while.

Although the author has probably been seeking realism in plodding through a succession of mundane events, the plot is very slight and tails off at the end, with even the final note of optimism seeming rather woolly and doubtful. Most of the characters seem somewhat underdeveloped and two-dimensional, all described through Doria's eyes rather than breathing with a life of their own. What makes the story bearable is Doria's sharp-eyed observation of life, with her wry humour.

This book has been so popular that it must appeal to teenagers, but I think they deserve something a little more challenging. Guène has plenty of time to progress to this, but in the meantime I only read to the end to practise my French and learn a bit more of the "argot" which increasingly divides the generations on France.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of Clandestin (Romans, Nouvelles, Recits (Domaine Francais)) by Eliette Abecassis.

This novella, written in crystal-clear, at times poetic prose, describes in minute detail the meeting between a man and a woman on a station platform and the development of their mutual awareness and attraction on the subsequent train journey. Who are they, and have they met before? Gradually, our questions are answered, as the story moves towards a dramatic climax, dispelling my fear that, having aroused my curiosity, it would have one of those unsatisfying, inconclusive endings.

Despite the minute exploration of people's appearances and feelings, the characters remain shadowy in some respects – we never learn their names, and the two men with whom the woman is involved are both referred to as "he" but can be distinguished by their very obvious differences. The objective, remote quality of the story at times may arise from its serving as an allegory for the nature of existence in general – the essential transience and unimportance of much of life, and the suggestion that we are often just "wandering" through our existence, or filling it up with mundane activities to avoid facing up to the fact that we are all "waiting" for it to end. This sounds rather gloomy, but the tone is quite positive in a philosophical way.

At times, it reads like a woman's magazine story about a pair of lovers, but it is deeper than that and somehow the more "sentimental" passages come across better in French! It also provides some good practice for students – lots of useful examples of applied grammar – past conditional and subjunctive tenses etc.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of The Châtelet Apprentice: The Nicolas Le Floch Investigations 1: The First Nicolas Le Floch Investigation by Jean-François Parot,Michael Glencross (Translator).

This first novel in the Nicholas Le Floch detective series, set in C18 France, reminds me of William Sansom's Shardlake series because of its attention to the details of social history and its intricate plotting. There is a whiff of Agatha Christie in the denouement to which Nicholas invites all the interested parties – still left alive- and summarises the situation: this was helpful in confirming that I had not "lost the plot".

Nicholas is an attractive hero, saved from the irritation that his good looks and charm might provoke by a refreshing capacity to commit blunders as well as the thoughtful and introspective side to his nature. This seems to stem from his experience as an orphan of unknown parentage, who has often met with resentment because of the generous support of his godfather, le Marquis de Ranreuil.

Armed with a letter of introduction from this benefactor, Nicholas travels to Paris and is taken on by the capricious and calculating Monsieur de Sartine, newly appointed Lieutenant General of Police and a rising star with King Louis XV himself. After his initial training, despite his youth, Nicholas is given the assignment to find what has befallen a missing colleague, and the complicated plot spins off from this point.

Apart from some rather gruesome corpses, the sex and violence in this book would not shock a maiden great-aunt – except perhaps for the hero's casual but probably true-to-life relationship with a prostitute. Some scenes are unlikely and a bit clunky, as when the brothel keeper, La Paulet, provides sensitive information too readily without checking Nicholas out, or when he eavesdrops on a revealing conversation involving de Sartine by entering a room without being noticed! His victory over an arch-villain in a swordfight is also implausible.

On the other hand, I enjoyed the "Frenchness" of it all – the obsession with eating well, the discussions about the pros and cons of haute cuisine, the details of how to cook pigs' trotters, a tasty working man's dish. Also, Parot often demonstrates his classical education "as a matter of course" , taking it for granted that the reader will understand an allusion, or be pleased to be told about it.

Although some of the cast e.g. the promiscuous Louise Lardin are a bit caricatured, Nicholas is an interesting character with quite a complex personality. I was a bit irritated by the Sherlock Holmes ploy of having him work out a solution on very slim evidence, but not reveal it to the reader for some time!

The translation may not quite do justice to Parot's literary talents, but the slightly stilted style fits with the period. I recommend this for those in search of a new detective series in an admittedly old-fashioned mode with an essentially predictable end if you want to try to work it out.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Fields of Glory by Jean Rouaud.

This English translation of the original Goncourt Prize winner, "Les Champs d'honneur" is useful for deciphering some of the obscurer French paragraphs, but I found the style intolerably stiff and unnatural. Is the translator a German speaker? This might account for what seemed like the over-literal translation which cries out to be edited line by line to create some semblance of natural flow.

The story itself may resonate for French people with memories of taciturn chain-smoking grandfathers driving leaky Citroen 2CVs through the interminable drizzle of the Lower Loire. With the admitted extra handicap of being an English speaker reading the original French version "Les Champs d'honneur" in translation, I found the whole chapters devoted to driving a beaten up 2CV, the rain, or the religious mania of a spinster aunt the literary equivalent of watching paint dry.

There were some striking descriptions, say of the landscape of Provence, and the book culminates in some haunting scenes on the experience of a gas attack in the First World War, or the exhumation of a brother, hastily buried by a stranger after a battle, but for me the build up to this was too slow and tortuous.

I gradually realised that the book was a study of how the First World War blighted the lives of not only the generation who suffered it directly but also their descendants. However, in "working backwards" through a series of in the main very mundane incidents with attention to minute detail of little interest, not to mention the endless digressions, I felt that I was reading fragments of a story in a fog.

I was always unclear in exactly which decade the narrator's boyhood was set and I was left quite confused by the last chapter at the cemetery (it's an unremittingly gloomy book) as to the blood relationship between the various characters, which until then I thought I just about understood.

⭐⭐ 2 Stars

This is my review of Les Champs d’Honneur by Jean Rouaud.

This may resonate for French people with memories of taciturn chain-smoking grandfathers driving leaky Citroen 2CVs through the interminable drizzle of the Lower Loire. With the admitted extra handicap of being an English speaker reading this in translation, I found the whole chapters devoted to driving a beaten up 2CV, the rain, or the religious mania of a spinster aunt the literary equivalent of watching paint dry.

There were some striking descriptions, say of the landscape of Provence, and the book culminates in some haunting scenes on the experience of a gas attack in the First World War, or the exhumation of a brother, hastily buried by a stranger after a battle, but for me the build up to this was too slow and tortuous.

I gradually realised that the book was a study of how the First World War blighted the lives of not only the generation who suffered it directly but also their descendants. However, in "working backwards" through a series of in the main very mundane incidents with attention to minute detail of little interest, not to mention the endless digressions, I felt that I was reading fragments of a story in a fog.

I was always unclear in exactly which decade the narrator's boyhood was set and I was left quite confused by the last chapter at the cemetery (it's an unremittingly gloomy book) as to the blood relationship between the various characters, which until then I thought I just about understood.

The only motivation for reading this book was to improve my "literary" French, in which regard it serves a useful purpose.

I used the translation by Ralph Manheim to guide me through some of the obscurer passages. It did not help that the translation seems very stilted and I had to wonder if English was Manheim's first language!

⭐⭐ 2 Stars

This is my review of Beni ou le paradis prive by Azouz Begag.

This is good for improving your "streetwise French" and provides an insight into the pressures on the children of Algerian immigrants growing up in French cities such as Lyons. There must be more than a touch of autobiography in Azouz Begag's portrayal of Beni, by turns cocky or insecure and self-deprecating. We see him facing prejudice at school, from the police, his would-be friend's mother and in his attempts to forge a western-style social life.

There are some moving moments: Beni persecutes his downtrodden sister, but feels sorry when he upsets her, yet cannot hug her since that kind of physical contact simply does not occur in his culture. He half-despises his father, a manual worker on construction sites, desperate for his son to succeed, trying to exert his authority by force if need be, but dependent on Beni to write letters for him. Yet despite his urges to be a normal teenager, Beni cannot break free from his father's values. When he is denied entry to a porn film (on grounds of age) he consoles himself with the knowledge that at least he can go home and look his father in the eye without lying.

Beni tries to survive by playing the comic, and fantasising about becoming a comedian or, in the meantime, realising a romance with a blonde class mate.

The story is really a set of anecdotes which you may find entertaining, along with Beni's tendency to misunderstand French words, despite his tactless habit of correcting people's grammar. It may appeal mostly as a novel for teenagers, but to be honest I found it quite tedious after a while.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of A Life’s Music by Andreï Makine,Andrei Makine.

With little in the way of plot – although it manages to build up quite a head of tension at times – , scant character development or dialogue – although it builds up clear impressions of most of the characters in only a few words- , this novella is a clear example of "less is more": it is more moving and insightful than many longer works in its portrayal of how human lives were damaged and destroyed by Stalin's Reign of Terror.

Alexei, on the brink of a career as a concert pianist, is warned by chance that the police have come for his parents. By chance, he assumes the false identity of a dead soldier and this sets a pattern for the random events which set him back at some points, but help him to survive at others.

Since this book is so short, you can concentrate on every word.

An example of the writer's insight on how self aware people in terrible situations may feel the delusion of being set apart from the crowd because they can analyse what is going on:

"I can put a name to our human condition and therefore escape from it. The frail human reed, that knows what it is and therefore….'Hah, that old hypocritical device of the intelligentisia'…"

A comment on what this book is all about:

"In this life there should be a key, a code for expressing in concise and unambiguous terms, all the complexity of our attempts, so natural and so grievously confused, at living and loving."

Or just a very apt and original description – which must also owe something to the excellent translation:

"In the frozen air the aggressive acidity of the big city stings the nostrils."

My only reservation is the device of having an anonymous narrator – who hardly seems necessary – introducing the idea of "longsuffering Soviet man" and describing the context of his meeting with Andrei, in chapters which "book-end" Andrei's account of his life.

I was interested to see that this was written originally in – and presumably translated directly from – French, although the author is Russian. I shall certainly look out for more of his work.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery,Alison Anderson (Translator).

My book group was polarised by this unusual tale. Half enjoyed it as a humorous satire of the middle class Parisian intelligentsia, and their obsession with teaching philosophy even to adolescents. These readers were touched by Renée, the self-educated and improbably knowledgeable Parisian concierge, who goes to extreme lengths to conceal her learning and forms a romantic attachment to a wealthy and highly cultured Japanese gentlemen. The rest (including me) were irritated by the thread of arrogance and unjustified sense of superiority which ran through the tale, with its judgemental main characters (concierge Renée and improbably precocious twelve-year old Paloma) and the lengthy passages of philosophy (on, say, the critique of phenomenology, the theories of William of Ockham, or the meaning of art) presented in an intolerably overblown prose which does not translate well into English.

The translation jars in places – "eructation", "time is sublimed", "deleterious hierarchies", "Hardcore autism that no cat would importune". I could go on, but all these examples seem over-literal translations from the French.

What troubled me most was uncertainty as to where fiction ends and the author's prejudices and pet philosophies (she apparently teaches this subject) begin. I was also irritated by Renée's lack of insight e.g. inverted snobbery towards others, and her failure to use her education to stop stereotyping and so misjudging her wealthy neighbours -apart from the Japanese Kakuro who is seen through rose-tinted spectacles.

There are plus factors in the form of some entertaining comic dialogues e.g. when Renée encounters two neighbours who fail to recognise her since she is out of her usual milieu, on a date with Kakuro, and thought-provoking insights on e.g. the superiority of sliding doors, or the meaning of the moment when a rose dies – other readers will no doubt find different examples that strike a chord.

If only this book could have been written with a defter touch, and more narration of events as they arose rather than reported in the pages of dry or pretentious journals, I would have rated it much more highly.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of Désert (Collection Folio) by Le Clezio.

This book has just been published in English, and I would be interested to see how it translates. (As an English speaker, I laboured through it in French, with a handful of phrases for which I could not work out the sense.)

I doubt whether any translation (except perhaps one by the bilingual author) can do justice to the language, which is like a long, rhythmic, hypnotically repetitive free verse poem about the harshly beautiful infinity of the desert to which man must adjust, for it makes no concessions. The lives of the nomads, barren existences of grinding poverty in the initial estimation of a privileged westerner, are in fact shown to have a dignity and sense of community, in balance with nature.

The narrative switches between 1909-12, when the desert warriors, the men in blue veils, are making their last abortive stand against the Christian imperialist invaders of North Africa, and the late C20 where the North Africans live a debased life in the coastal shanty towns – debased since they are desperately poor, but have lost contact with their old culture of desert-based nomadic self-sufficiency – and dream of life in great cities like Marseilles. Each thread focuses on a particular individual – in the earlier period, a young boy called Nour follows the ill-fated trek north across the desert to the sea in the wake of the charismatic leader Ma el Ainine, rendered ineffectual by age and his inadequate resources to fight the westeners with their artillery.

Nour's modern-day descendant is Lalla, the beautiful young girl, fascinated by and in tune with the desert, who nevertheless makes the journey to Marseilles where she is thrown into the squalid life of the immigrant scraping a living in a corrupt and ugly city which is portrayed as another type of desert, until her life is transformed in a way that I cannot reveal for fear of creating a "spoiler" except to say that I found it implausible and could not see how it added to the tale.

The book often frustrated me in its slow pace. Small details observed in passing, or the "greater scheme of things" seem more important than a strong plot line and well-developed series of interactions and events. Perhaps this is intentional, all part of a contemplative, spiritual focus which appears to be Le Clezio's main concern. The narrative speeds up with more moments of real pathos and drama towards the end – crises of life and death – but some of the significant events and characters on the way are underdeveloped – again, this may may be deliberate, since the book is mostly about the ambience and power of desert places. Given the missed opportunities for engagement between the main characters, I was struck by the way Le Clezio seems to have made an exception in the over-romanticised portrayal of Lalla.

Despite these apparently strong reservations, this book will stay with me, in terms of the evocative power of the language and the vivid visual images it conjured up of the desert landscapes in various lights, and of the nomads. Le Clezio describes the relatively few events of this book, people's thoughts and sensations, in minute detail. In so doing, he makes the reader more self aware, more attuned to the details of his or her own surroundings…..

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars